I've had three to five dreams now (it's hard to keep count because I can't remember every dream in perfect detail), with two men in them. I keep a dream log and I've nicknamed them Teddy and Diego, though they've never said their real names in the dreams. I've never met either of them in my life, they don't even look remotely similiar to anyone I know. They don't seem to want to hurt me, in fact they've saved my life in my dreams several times now, once from my own reflection. I have a feeling from the lastest couple of dreams that they want something from me, but I have no idea what.
Any ideas who these two might be, what they want from me, or what these dreams mean?

Can you clarify please? If you keep a dream log, you ought to know how many times you've dreamed about them, although you may not have written in detail.

It does sound, though, as if they are the dream counterparts of imaginary friends. It may be that although you are surrounded by other students, in another sense you are lonely.

That they are both male, and have played the "save the damsel in distress" scenario that is so often a prelude to a love relationship in our literary tradition, I think your sub-conscious mind is preparing you to have an erotic experience in your dreams with them. It's "okay", because they have showed true love by protecting you in the past. They are brave knights, they have saved you from the dragon, and they deserve their reward. Traditionally the damsel's role is passive.

What they want from you is permission. Of course what this really means is that you must /may give yourself permission to explore your own sexuality in dream mode.

Go ahead. It's safe, and not at all unpleasant.

Nomi800: You remind me that in some dreams I am enjoying so much what is going on that I try writing some parts of the scenes which are about to occur. It feels strange that I am that aware of what is occurring. So maybe you deliberately have these dreams, because they are pleasant dreams, parts of which you may even be writing.

That's interesting. Dreams as creative acts, like art.

I've tried to 'continue' good dreams that were interesting and fun by thinking about where the last one left off. Like being interrupted during a movie and wanting to find out the ending.

Hasn't worked so far.

babthrower: I get annoyed when I want to continue the dream but suddenly feel too tired to remember it. It's like walking into another room and getting annoyed, because I forgot why I walked so quickly into it.

Someone should write a book about how dreams resemble waking experiences. There probably is one such around somewhere.

Tsaeb says of dreams

quote:

Someone should write a book about how dreams resemble waking experiences. There probably is one such around somewhere.

Well, there’s been a lot of research done on mental imagery. I think a lot of it can be related to dreaming.

For example, when asked to recall a visual image, the subject has been shown some pictures of animals, and is asked to describe one detail from one picture, say, “What color was the German Shepherd’s collar?”, the test subject, who has sensors on the scalp or in the brain, shows heightened activity in the visual cortex – the part of the brain which becomes active when we are looking at something.

So it seems there is a memory in the actual visual cortex.

I have for years believed that the brain is a kind of machine that’s never switched off.

Its fodder is sensory input, memories, emotions (a kind of ‘mode’) Its operation is making connections, associations, looking for cause/effect relationships (which are just special kinds of associations) , all in the interests of survival.

And the only difference between the waking state and the sleeping state is that in the waking state, we have actaul real-world inputs, for the machine to process. Those inputs are reality-checks.

But in the dream state, without the reality checks, the brain can only process memories including visual and auditory memories, and associations made in the waking state. So that is why we can dream an event and later not clearly remember if it actually happened or was ‘just a dream’.

The brain surgeon Wilder Penfield almost a hundred years ago noticed that when he touched certain points in the living brain during surgery, the patient, who was fully conscious, (the brain itself cannot feel pain; the scalp is locally anesthetized) reported ‘memories’ of events. This caused Penfield to conclude that memories are stored in specific cells. But this was clearly an illogical conclusion. Just because the patient perceived them as ‘memories’ does not mean that they were memories of past events in that person’s life. They could have been memories of dreamed events, or even a completely new illusion caused by – anything, really – a microspark brought on by his metal probe’s inherent static charge.